Adobe Photoshop CS3 Performance

Posted on: May 25, 2007

Highly Efficient Rosetta or Darn Slow Photoshop?

When Apple
introduced Intel-based Macs, a year ago, it provided comprehensive
migration support, as well. Free compiler (program "translating"
human-readable source code of programs into "machine code") shipping
with OS X is able to produce so-called Universal Binary - code that both
old and new processors can understand. So, for many software vendors
migration was just a matter of recompiling their source code.
Unfortunately, it was more complicated and time-consuming for vendors of
large systems where recompilation is not as trivial. Several large
software vendors were not able to have their code recompiled and
debugged, yet.

To support those more inert, Apple developed technology called
Rosetta. Rosetta is a virtualization
engine that allows programs, written for old, G# processors to run on
Intel-based Macs without changing single line of code. Microsoft Office
for Mac, still runs on top of Rosetta, with no plans to recompile it
into Universal Binary. Adobe, also, did not have universal binary
version of its graphical applications, until recently. In Adobe's case
they were very eager to complete the migration, though, as
virtualization is a performance hit and performance is important for a
graphical information processing software like that from Adobe.

The highlight of and the biggest advancement in the recently released
Adobe Creative Suite 3 is the fact that it is compiled in universal
binary - with full support of Intel processors and avoiding Rosetta.
Adobe is very excited about it and has been honking all over the press
how much better/faster the new version is.

Is it really?

A friend of mine got CS3 and we did a quick-n-dirty test on it. CS3 does
start-up pretty quickly compared to the under-Rosetta CS2 , but that's
about it. We had both versions apply a 100%, best-quality radial spin
blur to a hi-rez (3004x3760, 1.1MB) photo on a Macbook Core Duo with
1.5GB RAM. Results are as follows:

CS2 (w/ Rosetta): 2.04 sec
CS3: 1.33 sec

That, my friends is just 53% increase in speed and, honestly, would
hardly impress anybody, even in a quick-and-dirty test. Either Rosetta
is incredibly efficient (kudos to Apple) or Adobe did not do too good of
a job, or both.

Concluding analysis, we need to mention another metrics, as well, to be
fair. The memory footprint of CS3 was significantly lower - 80MB vs
255MB consumed by CS2. Not bad.

Irakli Nadareishvili's Blog

"The only things you need to be a great programmer are: curiosity, empathy and attention to detail. Everything else you can learn over time. Everything." ~ @inadarei